China and Russia’s Air Forces Exposed in Actual Combat

18 thoughts on “China and Russia’s Air Forces Exposed in Actual Combat”

1. > US pilots have actual combat experience or are trained by pilots with actual combat experience.

   Dropping JDAMs onto technicals isn’t relevant combat-experience against a near-peer power. US pilots haven’t faced significant air defenses in 30 years.

2. Engine life is definitely a thing, but Soviet jet engines were known to be logistical supply items going in, so at least on paper they were supposed to be produced and stockpiled in sufficient quantities for longer wars. The larger issue is design airframe fatigue life, which has tripped up the U.S. in multiple fighter designs including the F-15. In Soviet design there was expected to be a very short design lifetime, but those airframes have been flying now for decades. Before the Ukraine war the Russian air forces were quite miserly about flight hours, to the detriment of their pilots skills. But since the invasion all the Russian air arms have been flying much accelerated sortie rates and in combat conditions, which means pulling Gs, and that uses up the life of things like fuselage longerons and wing spars that much faster.
   I read reporting somewhere that at least some of the Russian losses in combat, once investigated, were found to be unrelated to any known munitions, with the conclusion that undertrained pilots pulling too hard to get out of MANPAD/SAM envelopes and experiencing “the wing folded up” fatigue failures.
   And there’s not really any new airframe production going on in Russia.

3. Quite an irrelevant analysis, for once. The only important metric in warfare is bombs/missiles on target (BOT). Russia, using its limited inventory, has no issues in that department. Sure, beautiful avionics or engines built to last 5 decades are nice to have, but not necessary.

   The planes work just fine as missile trucks. Those missiles turn out to be more often deadly than not.

   Why not do an analysis on whether Russia can sustain this operational level and whether it can do it in a fashion more economical than the West? Because, if they can fight indefinitely, they win, inevitably. At this time the West does not even have the factories.

   • I think you misread the article. It isn’t about Russia-Ukraine. It uses Russian performance in Ukraine and overall as a proxy for seeing how the Chinese would stack up against the U.S. — USAF is not going to go up against Russia over Ukraine, but may against China over Taiwan. The article could have made that point more clearly.

     If you’ll pardon the tangent, I personally did not care for this aside: “The US military has no interest in telling everyone how pathetic the Russian and Chinese Air Force is. Why? The US military wants to justify getting more planes and more equipment.” Are budget and turf games part of it? Certainly. But there are other reasons, some quite valid, for pursuing more planes even in light of “how pathetic the the Russian and Chinese Air Force(s) [are]” which are simply handwaved away.

     So, the points that the Russian and Chinese air forces have significant inadequacies I think are well taken, but this article was not meant to be a deep-think piece, and it is unfair to judge as if it were.

4. Brian, the US spend more on military defense then almost the rest of the world combined. It should be expected that the US have the best, greatest, and latest. However, it should be noted that the US has taken great lengths to keep the best weapons out of the Ukraine battle field less it create bad press if the weapons get destroyed by Russia (PR is everything…). The exception are the standoff attacked weapons that can be position out of the range of Russian missiles and artilliary and bradleys. It has allowed allies to take the lead in providing armors. The destruction of UK and German (supposedly invincible) MBTs has decreased the halo around their weapon prowness. BTW superficial copying is easy… to make a copy of a complicated machinery to be as good as the original is real hard. It often takes a genious mind to copy another genious mind.

5. I follow Andrei Martyanov and he has a much different take. Basically he says that the US has never flown against a real air defense system like Russia’s S-400 or S-500.

   Also he puts more stock in long range missiles and hyper sonic missiles. Russian aircraft don’t need to leave Russian airspace to attack within a thousand miles. Their new air-to-air missile has a published range of over 400 kilometers. The days of top gun style dogfights are over according to him.

   • Ukraine destroyed at least three of the S-400 missile systems.
     Volleys of cheap missiles and drones. First dumb missiles, the S-400 activated radar. The next volley of radar seeking missiles destroyed the radar, then more missiles destroyed the S-400s. The US does not have to fly against the S-400, the US can use missile volley and drones to beat the S-400. Russia’s hypersonic missiles are also being shot down. Not getting good speed or dodging.

     No hypothetical but actual destruction of many Russian planes, russian S-400s, and their Kinzhal hypersonic missiles.
     https://www.newsweek.com/russian-s-400-destroyed-attack-ukraine-atacms-1838477#:~:text=Ukrainian%20forces%20destroyed%20three%20of,Russian%20Telegram%20channel%20has%20reported.

     https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ukraine-and-the-kinzhal-dont-believe-the-hypersonic-hype/

     • That still does not answer the question how well F15 and F16 fair against Russian air defenses such as S300, S400 and the manpads per the topic of the article. The US does have inside knowledge of S400 since the design (and the T80/T90) was sold to South Korea when Russia was just trying to survive after the breakup of the USSR

       • S-400s have been destroyed in Ukraine just using drones and a few different volleys of cheap missiles, radar seeking missiles and some better missiles.

         https://www.newsweek.com/russian-s-400-destroyed-attack-ukraine-atacms-1838477#:~:text=Ukrainian%20forces%20destroyed%20three%20of,Russian%20Telegram%20channel%20has%20reported.

         All of Russia’s military equipment has been exposed.

       • The F-15 and F-16 will never face an S300 or S400 because F-35s (which were designed for SEAD/DEAD) will destroy them first. The WEZ for F-35s is far beyond the distance at which the S300 or S400 could plausibly achieve a targeting solution. We’ve seen S300s and S400s destroyed by 90s era HARMs and ATACMs in Ukraine so I have no doubt that F-35s could destroy those air defense systems with their significantly more sophisticated sensors and munitions. Manpads are irrelevant when aircraft are operating at 30,000’+ and near Mach .7+. The energy equation isn’t even close.

         S300 and S400 serve as nothing more than a delay mechanism against western air superiority. F-35s kick the door down and then the airspace is flooded with modernized 4th gen platforms (plus F-35s).

6. sorry Brian for little off topic (I have no other place where to post it), but you wrote about this subject so many times, recorded so many vids, so I guess you care about it.

   I just want to ask, where is LK-99 paper which Koreans promised to publish?

   Would you write some update article or you gave up and accepted that it was a scam/error?
   No more LK-99 articles?, is it dead and now we are simply waiting for new recipe/new material/true RT superconductor?

7. I’ve been told that a significant part of Russia’s problem with it’s air force is training. While NATO trains it’s pilots for a long time to fly mission with many multiple aircraft against many multiple targets in a contested airspace, Russia doesn’t have the funding and expertise to do that. We have seen in Syria and at the beginning of the Ukraine war when they tried using air power aggressively that they flew at most 4 aircraft on simple missions.

   I don’t know how China’s training compares.

   This doesn’t negate the points you made; the training problem just compounds the other issues and are not going to get better while the war is going on. One more reason why Russian apologists in the West will increasingly want to pressure Ukraine to “compromise” and let Russia have some sort of partial genocide so they can rest and prepare for the other part later.

8. I would not get too hung up on engine life. Long engine life is useful in peace time when planes will spend most of their time flying around trying to act as a deterrent. However when the missiles and bullets start flying, those planes will not use even a fraction of their engine life before being shot down. There is not any difference between a 4000 hour engine and 12000 hour engine when they are sitting on the ocean floor in pieces.

9. I am not sure I would get too hung up on engine longevity. Engine longevity is nice during peace time when the plane spends a lot of time just flying around and acting as a deterrant. The planes will probably not use even a fraction of a percent of that longevity once missiles and bullets start flying. There is not much difference between a 4000 hour engine and a 12000 hour engine when they are sitting on the ocean floor in pieces.

10. So, Brian … something NOT to want is a Russia that is really losing its edge, and a China which gets shown in the heat-of-battle to be a flock of rubber duckies.

    Makes sovereigns really mad when the monies and treasure invested in being competent militarily is shown to be abject waste. Sheepish of course externally. But seething internally.

    With the hotspots of The World seemingly forever either nearly-at war, or just warring, we hope that the Big Sovereigns of Planet Dirt don’t give up on their paper airplanes and lob missiles at each other, tipped with hideous nuclear might.

    ________________________________________

    Personally I think that China has the true upper edge. She copies shamelessly. Duplicates and rubber stamps. But on the other hand, she — and she alone, note — has finally developed competent 7 nanometer microchip manufacturing smarts. And industry. And factories.

    Just saying: sure, the aircraft is ‘only’ 30% or so electronic, but significantly, almost all the nearly magical things America’s high-fliers can do is dependent heavily on integrated electronics that can process trillions of instructions per second. Sure, sure, much of that to keep up with the endlessly layered ‘tub-ware’ of backward compatibility. But increasingly, much of it is brand new.

    And because our earstwhile friend China is such a copy-artist, her stealth-fighter designs more-or-less have the right shape. As she sees them falling out of the sky to anti-aircraft missiles, she’ll figure out how the anti-RADAR reflection coatings work, and begin to make more stealthy planes.

    Russia meanwhile, seems mired in ‘too much oil, nothing else really makes money significantly’ syndrome. Right?

    It is precious hard to name 10 products which Russia makes that any country would buy from them besides their military wings and artillary. Anything chip-making? No, why not? Can that be bootstrapped? AI? ah, no not that either.

    Just saying.

    The times are a’changing.

    ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

    • As Peter Zeihan had noted, the 7nm development was allowed because the tooling was present before sanctions

    • Almost regardless of how the war in Ukraine is resolved the Russian arms industry is deeply screwed. Who is going to line up to buy S400s when they’re being destroyed by missiles from the 90s? Who is going to buy another T-72/T-80/T-90? Who’s going to buy another re-labeled Mig-29/Su-27? Nobody. Weapons exports are headed to zero if not already functionally zero.

      That leaves Russia with oil exports and… that’s about it?

      • Naw, they also have fertilizers, grains and lots of metals as well as gasses. So, mostly commodities… and they have ruined their appeal in the eyes of their “customers”. Would you want to use an untrustworthy vendor of vital supplies?

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